Doctor Who Common Entries Contests

DWCE1: 28 February 2009

This is the first Doctor Who Common Entries Contest, which is a spin-off from the Doctor Who Rare Entries Contests I have been running on and off since May 2006. My thanks to Monwhea Jeng whose rules for Common Entries Contests were of great help in constructing mine (insofar as I copied bits of them). Momo's contests are archived here but I don't regard any rulings there as in any way binding upon me.

SHORT RULES

The purpose of this game is as follows: for each of the questions, your objective is to give an answer that will be duplicated by as MANY other people as possible. While some answers will be marked by me as equivalent, no answers will be marked wrong.

** Answers must be submitted by email only. DO NOT POST ANSWERS HERE **

QUESTIONS

Name an actor who has played The Doctor, other than Tom Baker

Name a companion

Give a word used in a Doctor Who story title

Name a Doctor Who spin-off

Describe a way in which the 2005- series is different from the Classic Series

Name a Doctor Who story

Name a Doctor Who writer

Name a Doctor Who director

What would you watch on TV if Doctor Who was not on?

Name something Doctor Who fans argue about

LONG RULES

In order to participate in the contest, send your answers to me by email before noon on Friday 13 March. It is of course essential that nobody sees the answers given by other entrants before the deadline, so please do NOT post your answers here!

If there are fewer than 10 entrants, I may not bother working out who's won, so if this sounds like fun, do encourage others to play.

Make sure you have read the rules before submitting your answers.

1. Scoring
Your score on each question is equal to the number of people who give that answer. If you skip a question, or leave it blank, you will score 1 for that question. Your total score is the product of your scores on each question. [u]Your object is to get as high a score as possible.[/u] In the results posting I will also give a theoretical maximum score (in one sense at least).

2. Answers
NO ANSWERS WILL BE JUDGED INCORRECT. As moderator, I will need to decide if two answers are the same, but I will not check the answers for correctness. The object is to get the most common answer, which is not necessarily the most common correct answer.

2.1 More Specific Variants
A general class and a specific member of that class will be treated as distinct answers. An ambiguous answer will be treated as a general class consisting of all things which that ambiguous answer might be interpreted as.

2.2 Scoring Example
Say I ask for someone the Doctor has kissed. There are 27 entrants: 11 say "Rose" and 8 say "Rose Tyler", 2 say "Cassandra in the body of Rose Tyler", 4 say "Captain Jack", 1 says "Daphne Ashbrook" and 1 says "Lynda Moss". I consider that the people who said Rose and the people who said Rose Tyler gave the same answer, so these people all get 19 points. The 4 people who answered "Captain Jack" get 4 points each. Although "Cassandra in the body of Rose Tyler" is a more specific variant of "Rose Tyler", these are scored as separate answers, so these people get 2 points. The Doctor never kissed actress Daphne Ashbrook (although he may have kissed Grace Holloway) nor Lynda Moss, but despite this, each of these entrants score one point.

3. Entries
Entries must be emailed to me personally by email: tomsalinsky@googlemail.com. Do NOT post your answers on the forum! If you give an answer that properly refers to a different thing related to the one you intended, I will normally take it as written. Once you intentionally submit an answer, no changes will be allowed, unless I decide there was a problem with the question. Similarly, alternate answers within an entry will not be accepted. Only the first answer that you intentionally submit counts. Also, multiple entries from the same person are not allowed.

4. Scope
Unless a question indicates otherwise, all questions refer to transmitted episodes of the BBC television series "Doctor Who" in its original run from 1963 to 1989, the TV Movie of 1996 and the current series which began in 2005.

5. Incarnations
Unless otherwise specified, different incarnations of the same character are the same character and will be treated as equivalent answers, and equivalent to specifying that character without reference to incarnation. In other words, "Romana", "Romana I" and "Romana II" are all the same answer.

6. Judging
As moderator, I will be the sole judge of whether two answers with similar meanings are considered the same or different. I will do my best to be fair on all such issues, but sometimes it is necessary to be arbitrary. I may rescore the contest if I agree that I made a serious error and it affects the high finishers.

7. Results
Results will normally be posted within a few days of the contest closing. They may be delayed if I'm unexpectedly busy or for technical reasons.

8. Archive
DWCE1 will be added to the archive of DWRE contests at www.tomsalinsky.co.uk/dwre, and so will any future DWCE contests I might run.